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Last year, I had the opportunity to visit Botswana with Natural Habitat Adventures. This two-week trip on the Secluded Botswana Photo Safari enabled our small group to view wildlife in a variety of settings, from the arid Chobe National Park to the lush Okavango Delta.
This post is by our newest iSafari.com contributor Maia Wikler, a Colorado College graduate with a passion for anthropology, human rights, travel and conservation. When she isn’t writing or reading she loves to be active outside and planning the next adventure.
With family in town for the holidays and trying to find an activity we could all enjoy, I noticed that Galapagos 3D: Nature’s Wonderland, an IMAX production, was playing at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Due largely to the high value of powdered rhino horns in traditional Chinese medicine, poachers killed 98 percent of the rhinos in Africa between 1960 and 1995. Even now, rhino populations continue to decline rapidly around the world.
The whole family was already out of their berths at the rapid rise of the equatorial sun, and their six-year-old daughter was on the aft deck, dutifully continuing her outdoor physics experiment.
The Galapagos Islands have been part of Gustavo Andrade’s life for as long as he can remember. Raised by a father who worked as a Galapagos tour boat captain for many years, Gustavo’s childhood was spent sailing the seas. The islands were his summer playground, the sea lions and marine turtles, his playmates.
This year, the National Park Service (NPS) is celebrating its centennial, and there are numerous plans and scheduled activities to encourage more Americans to discover and explore their national parks.
While visiting the tiny little village of Churchill with WWF & Natural Habitat Adventures, we were lucky enough to witness a “polar bear lift,” a critical tool in the polar bear conservation toolbox—and one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
I remember the first time I saw a grizzly bear in the wild—it was while guiding a group of travelers on an incredible hiking and biking trip through one of the most spectacularly scenic landscapes in the world: Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park (WGIPP).
In the Galapagos National Park, you’re not allowed to come within six feet of an animal, but it’s nearly impossible to follow this rule. One of the incredible things about the Galapagos Islands and the National Park program is how successful the local conservation efforts are in protecting the flora and fauna of the islands.
I learned on my recent Secluded Botswana Safari that, since the Botswana government has outlawed hunting, most animals, particularly predators, are quite used to trucks. In fact, they simply see our game drive vehicles as part of the scenery, or perhaps a non-threatening animal that they can’t quite get a consistent scent on.
“We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day. We’re not scared.”
